SC207 Software Engineering Term Paper 2002:
My Best View of a Topic in Software Engineering
Rifkin,S.
What makes measuring software so hard?
IEEE Software, Volume: 18 Issue: 3, May-June 2001
Page(s): 41 -45
Getting software measurement into market practice is not an easy task to do. One important reason for this is that traditional software improvement is not aligned with business objectives. Many organizations strategically focused on operational excellence. This traditional measurement prioritizes aspects such as increased quality, increased programmer productivity, and reduced costs. But, it would be another case if organization’s main aim were not the operational excellence. Such organizations have different measurement needs.
We need to develop a new set of measures for all those customer-intimate and product-innovative organizations. In this case, software measurement plays essential role to all areas of software process improvement. Doing so, implementing software measurement will be as easy as implementing strategy. When organization’s market discipline has aligned with the software improvement, then the implementation can be accelerated.
The article discussed how software measures are brought into the organizational market strategies. Many software development organizations strive not to become operationally excellent. So we have left them in the lurch, and we tend to treat them as resisters and of bad character. In fact, it may be nothing more than a mismatch of goals.
New methodologies of measurement are needed to improve operations. The new set of measures raised here is the customer intimacy and product innovativeness approach. Many executive organizations have implemented these techniques, especially for those who do not focus on operational excellence. Detailed explanation on how these features would benefit will be elaborated in this paper as we go along.
Contributions for Software Engineering Field
Two main new measures introduced to the software engineering field are the customer intimacy and product innovativeness. These contribute to changes in organizations’ strategies to achieve their goals. There is a large set of software development organizations that strive for customer intimacy and will do anything their client requests. In this way, they know their clients well, probably even better than the clients know themselves. An example of this might be a payroll service that has seen every variation on payroll and knows more about payroll processing than any in-house payroll department could. The most customer-intimate payroll service would eventually take over their customers' entire payroll departments.
One example of the top product-innovative organizations is Microsoft. The products are focused on the new, glitzy features, not the up time or reliability. The company wants to earn and own its clients based on new features, not by offering operationally excellent software. In that context, the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model for SoftwareSM is silent on product innovativeness and customer intimacy. It only applies to organizations wanting to be operationally excellent.